Agile Giants: Lessons from Corporate Innovators

About 18 months ago, Bill Pescatello returned to corporate venture after a stint in a traditional VC fund (Lightbank). Evolv is a $100 million firm created in partnership with Kraft Heinz. Bill already had CVC experience as he started his career post business school working at NBC’s Corporate Venture group. We talked on the episode about why Bill decided to return to CVC and how Evolv Ventures is set up. 

Show Links:

• Bill's Twitter
• Bill's LinkedIn
• Evolv Ventures Homepage
• Evolv Ventures Medium

We are continuing our conversation for another week on Corporate Venture Capital (CVC). This time returning to academia and having a conversation with Professor Song Ma from Yale. He has written three papers that influenced my thinking significantly. We talk about each in this week’s episode. 

You can follow the links to all three from Professor Ma’s Faculty page and also encourage you to follow him on Twitter. 

https://som.yale.edu/faculty/song-ma

https://twitter.com/ProfSongMa

This week our conversation continues to focus on corporate venture capital. However, we go from Harvard Business School to a “serial CVC” as Matt has been at 3 different corporate venture groups — Comcast, Cisco and now Citi Ventures. 

Matt has a great perspective from all three of those experiences and we also talk about specific things unique to the approach Citi Ventures takes given reporting structure and overall strategic objectives of the fund. 

Show Links:

Matt's Twitter & LinkedIn

Citi Ventures Homepage 

Professor Josh Lerner is an academic giant. His 2013 article in HBR on Corporate Venturing is constantly being referenced in conversations as companies explore setting up their own Corporate Venture Capital group. He also has written a number of best selling books, which we reference on today’s episode and talk about the impact for each of you as corporate innovators. I think this week’s conversation will put into context a lot of the work you’re doing, from a real academic thought leader.

Josh's HBS Site: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=9961

I’m excited to start a second season of Agile Giants with my friend Matt Fleckenstein. Matt has been a VC, traditional entrepreneur and corporate entrepreneur inside Microsoft and Salesforce. 

Matt & I talk about his observations generally across those experiences as well as his current role where he really leads innovation across an interesting portfolio of Microsoft Products including IoT, mixed reality and quantum computing.

(Full Disclosure: One of those traditional startups Matt & I co-founded together with two other founders.) 

Dave & I have known each other for a long time. We first got to know each other through his involvement helping lead a Cincinnatti based startup accelerator, The Brandery.

More recently, Dave came out with a book a couple of years ago called Predicting the Turn.

There’s a ton I enjoyed about this week’s episode, but actually probably the thing I enjoyed the most was the detour we took into corporate venture capital. Dave’s actually been a corporate venture capitalist twice in his career and has two more traditional financially driven VC work experiences as well. And so his perspective on how to do CVC I thought was quite interesting and relevant for a lot of you who have been reaching out to learn more on the topic, dovetailing nicely into the podcast we did earlier this year with Rich from the Touchdown Ventures team. 

Show Links:

  Dave on Twitter & LinkedIn

  Dave's book

  The Brandery

Rita McGrath is a legend in the field of corporate innovation. She developed the methodology used by so many companies today “Discovery Driven Planning” and has written numerous best-selling books. 

She recently had a new book come out “Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen” 

On this episode, we talk about her new book as well as observations on how corporate’s perspectives on innovation have evolved and the arc of her career. 

Show Links:

• Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Rita’s new book) 
• Valize (Rita’s software company) 
• RitaMcGath.com (Rita’s personal site)

On this week’s episode, I respond to a question I’m getting more and more from you on social media & via email is:

How does each of these different techniques highlighted in Agile Giants fit into a company’s overall growth strategy? 

(Or if not that exact question a version of it) 

I try to provide some context in this quick episode, but the biggest point is there are synergies across these tactics so it isn’t "build vs buy" but instead "build AND buy"! 

After 8-years, working in various roles across the organization, three years ago Keith Berry founded the Moody’s Analytics Accelerator at the directive of the Board. This is a group inside Moody’s focused on launching innovative products typically via a partnership with a FinTech startup. 

As many of you are thinking through how to set up your own innovation lab or accelerator, there are a ton of lessons from Moody’s Analytics experience including: (1) how they partner with Fintechs, (2) how trends influencing their thesis and (3) specifically how they’ve approached AI/ML as a big trend influencing so much of their work today.